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[Free Article] Playing TES (a Demystifying Guide)

With the random banning of Mystical Tutor by the DCI, storm combo players are in
a state of flux. The most common and best placing storm list in the recent
months, what I call UB Saito ANT (named after the pro who top8'd with the build
and popularized it), is on definite life support due to a lack of Mystical
Tutor. Let's look at that list and see if we can identify what made it rise to
the top in recent past:

If you look through this deck, you'll notice there are 3 (4 if you count the
opponent killing themselves or conceding to you) ways to win the game. The
first, easiest, and most obvious is to resolve Ad Nauseam, follow it up with
the spells you draw and then Tendrils the opponent. The second, only slightly
less obvious, is to bait the opponent into doing something silly like
countering the wrong cards, increasing the storm count, and letting you abuse a
normally 6-8 card hand on your combo turn to kill them with a Tendrils. The
third is to use your tutors and draw to setup double Tendrils, either via a
mini tendrils (i.e. non-lethal tendrils) to gain some life to stay alive, or
with two tendrils on the same turn.

The business (tutors + draw + tendrils) is combined with the best discard in the
format, the best acceleration, and a stable manabase to form Voltron. Well,
maybe not Voltron, but definitely the Juggernaut you feared way back in Summer
Camp who wasn't stopped by your hefty Wall of Fire.

With Mystical Tutor being no more, UB ANT is looking for a replacement. The
"obvious" solutions are Dark Confidants maindeck, additional SDT/Ponder + 4th
Infernal Tutor, or LDV.

Confidant maindeck will just turn on previously unusable removal. Seemingly
everyone who has played legacy storm for any length of time has tried to make
Confidant Tendrils work in Legacy, but removal is still a sticking point. You
don't want to spend your precious discard keeping Confidant as live in a deck so
focused on abusing Ad Nauseam during the generally narrow window where your life
total is high.

Additional Ponders and SDTs still leave you with only 6 (8 if you count
drawing double tendrils or forcing your opponent into playing poorly and a
single Tendrils) real business spells in the deck. Even increasing the fetch
count to around 10 doesn't guarantee that you see Ad Nauseam or Infernal Tutor
by turn 3, although you probably will most of the time. This exact problem led
to inconsistency in the newest UR TEPS from the past extended season where it
mostly relied running 4 "real" bombs (Mind's Desire) and then Ponder/Peer
Through Depths/Sleight of Hand to simulate extra Desires.

LDV is worse in a list that doesn't have something like Ill-Gotten Gains or
Doomsday to let you win at lower life. Initial lifeloss isn't so much the issue
(you generally find something in the first 15 cards so you won't spend a lot of
life), but extra copies flipped during a resolving Ad Nauseam are very painful
and nowhere near as useful as a Mystical was. On the upside, if you cut an
Tendrils for an Ill-Gotten Gains and play around 2 LDVs, your LDV will find LED
to make SDT IT->IGG easier.

In a theoretical, slower list, you might consider going:

-4 Mystical Tutor
-1 Cabal Ritual
-1 Tendrils of Agony

+1 Ill-Gotten Gains
+2 Ponder
+2 Lim-Dul's Vault
+1 Thoughtseize

The additional Ponders and Thoughtseize are a nod to needing the card selection
as well as needing more protection given that you will be slower since you can
no longer eot or upkeep Mystical to get Ad Nauseam as often on turn 2.

This gameplan (UB Saito ANT's), if you haven't noticed already, is fairly linear
for a storm deck. When compared to something like The EPIC Storm (TES), a 5c
storm deck with Burning Wishes and additional engines in Diminishing Returns and
Ill-Gotten Gains, you might begin to see where this UB list found its reputation
(unfairly IMO) as easy to play amongst storm players. Even TES with its
Burning Wishes (along with the common Mystical Tutors and Infernal Tutors) is
relatively linear if you consider that its engines don't actually require a lot
of choices.

That is, in both of these decks, the hardest decisions are when to
Duress/Thoughtseize and what to take, when to cast
Brainstorm and what to put back, if and when to use SDT, and when to break
fetches. Most of your other decisions don't take a lot of thought. You might
think you have a decision in UB ANT with what to find with your hellbent
Infernal Tutor after City of Traitors, Lotus Petal, Dark Ritual, Lion's Eye
Diamond, and while you technically could get something that isn't Ad Nauseam,
your opponent probably doesn't start the game on 12 life (yes, it is 12 life
because you can IT->IT->Tendrils). Mystical Tutor might technically offer
choices, but in practice good players cast it at the last moment before they
want to go off to find what they need (protection, acceleration, maybe a bomb)
or as a desperation move to bait counters/standstill/to find Brainstorm because
they are stuck on something. Even with TES, with its Burning Wishes, you don't
get a significantly more complicated deck since your wis targets are largely
dictated by your available mana:

If you're not immediately winning with Tendrils, or finding an obvious solution
to some problem (Grapeshot, Deathmark, Shattering Spree, etc):

If you have 4-6 mana floating, you have two to three choices: Empty the
Warrens (ETW), Diminishing Returns (DReturns), and Ill-Gotten Gains (IGG, also
not really a choice unless you have at least 5 since you need to float at
least one to do stuff post-IGG).

IGG

Obviously you don't IGG when your opponent has relevant stuff like lethal burn
or countermagic with the means to play them in their yard. Precluding that
scenario, and assuming you have something to IGG for (another Wish, Infernal
Tutor, perhaps a Tendrils of Agony), it's a guaranteed win.

ETW

Obviously this is bad if you Duress your opponent and see castable mass
removal, they have it onboard already (EE @ 0, Deed, etc) or in general know
that they have it or side it in against you (if you don't know this for common
decks, you should research it). ETW doesn't suffer the problem of IGG and
DReturns against control (giving your opponent countermagic back) but will
require passing the turn (barring something strange like the opponent
Meditating at some point).

DReturns

This is generally bad if your opponent has countermagic in their deck, but it's
also the cheapest potential solution to win this turn. This isn't a guaranteed
win (especially with only 4 mana to cast it), but if miles better than ETW into
board sweepers against known board sweeper decks or guaranteed IGG returning
enemy Force of Will. If everything else is going poorly, (i.e. there's an EE @
0, your opponent has Force + Stifle + Mindbreak Trap in the yard, and you're
at low life), DReturns still has a theoretical shot of winning you the game
resulting in its perception as an "Oh Shit" button.

You consider these cards in this order and pick the one most likely to win the
game. Using these criteria (which are mostly obvious to an experienced magic
player), you pick the best one.

If you have 7 mana, you open up the option to Infernal Tutor->Ad Nauseam, then
falls into the order below IGG assuming you have a decent life total.

Bringing up the subject of Ad Nauseam, this is how to play the card:

After each card flipped:

Decision: Does this + what I've seen before (in hand, in play, from adn) win me
the game? If so, win the game.

Next Decision: If not, will can I die by flipping the worst possible card?
(i.e., the highest casting card in the deck + known or expected burn spells) If
not, continue flipping.

Next Decision: If you might die, consider if you will win the game with what you
have next turn after taking damage from known sources (creatures on table, burn
in hand, etc). If you'll die if you pass the turn regardless, continue flipping.
If not, stop.

You could argue that considering whether to stop before you might die but still
passing the turn is correct, but unless you know your opponent has absolutely
nothing they can draw or the only card left in your deck that can win you the
game is a 1-of with no ability to tutor for it, you're likely wrong.

What does all of this have to do with Mystical Tutor being banned? Check the
number of copies in the TES list. That's not a typo. Further, in two top8
appearances in the month of June, Mystical Tutor was almost without fail, sided
out.

In a deck as redundant as TES (separated into mana, bombs, protection), you
generally only need a class of card, not a particular card. Burning Wish is
still available to silver-bullet that moonlighting Teeg or Chalice of the Void
across the table, so you can look to things that perform a similar role in card
selection (or you can be Bryant Cook, add in the 4th Infernal Tutor, pick a
random 60th card and call it a day (j/k Bryant, mostly)). Since you're already
playing Brainstorm and Ponder, your next best choice for card selection is
Preordain (SDT is bad in combination with Gemstone Mine).

For those of you keeping score at home, this means that TES isn't all that much
harder to pilot than UB Saito ANT. It plays most of the same cards, but is
still in a position to easily smash aggro and runs enough disruption to give
control fits.

Stay tuned for some Brainstorm/Ponder discussion, sideboarding analysis, and
some play by plays featuring TES in the upcoming weeks.

[Edit: To head off questions: I'm still playing Doomsday, but at this point, I doubt less than 10 people who read this forum can navigate its decision trees well enough in real time, and of those, I'm not even confident that I can play it through a long event, although I hope to try. This makes it a bad subject to write about.]